Hong Myung-bo has no right to speak up about any club.
South Korean national coach Hong Myung-bo recently caused a bit of a stir within the Bayern Munich fandom by blaming the club for his star center-back Kim Min-jae’s absence from the national team.
Kim recently pulled out of Korea’s latest call-up list after Bayern coach Vincent Kompany announced that his niggling Achilles problems necessitated a multiple week-long rest. Hong took to the media and said Bayern and Kompany were to blame for him not being able to use his best defender in the upcoming World Cup qualifiers, citing the lack of rest that Bayern gave Kim.
While it is understandable for a national coach to be annoyed when he isn’t able to use his best players, Hong has no right to complain. Kim’s Achilles problems stretch all the way back to last October. Despite multiple reports and comments from Kim himself that he was playing through pain, it was Hong who kept calling Kim up for the national team and adding thousands of miles, hours of flight time, and more stress to his body. With all the travel that Kim was forced to do over the October and November international breaks, to and from Germany and Korea and the Middle East, it was only a matter of time before he finally snapped. Without Kompany’s intervention, Kim probably would have suffered a severe injury, because knowing Hong, he would have played Kim for 90 minutes in both games.
But Maverick, you sharp-tongued shark of shame, I hear you say, why wouldn’t a national coach call up his best defender for World Cup qualifying matches? Well, dear reader, you may be right, but one needs to put things into perspective. Korea is currently in the easiest qualifying group possible in the current format. If Korea cannot beat the likes of Oman, Iraq, and Palestine without Kim, in a group they don’t even need to finish on top of, they have no business going to the World Cup at all.
If Kim was ailing, Hong should have used his absence to look for other talents to take to the World Cup. Instead, he insisted on using his best available players over and over, ultimately resulting in gassed out seasons for a lot of Korea’s top players, such as Son Heung-min and Hwang Hee-chan. Kim is not the only player that has suffered the curse of Hong, as Feyenoord’s Hwang In-beom was also questionably called up despite having missed several weeks due to injury.
In fact, Hong should not even be Korea’s national coach in the first place. After Jürgen Klinsmann’s disastrous stint, Korea was left scrounging for coaches left right and center, not too unlike where Bayern was when they had to find a replacement for Jhomas Juppel – sorry, Thomas Tuchel. But instead of going for more established candidates, allegedly including current Canada coach Jesse Marsch, Korea’s questionable federation decision-makers, led by president Chung Mong-gyu, decided they wanted yet another “yes-man” who would listen to what they said and turn a blind eye to their many errors. Hong was coaching K League champions Ulsan HD at the time, and had repeatedly stated that he would not be joining the national team no matter what. But he then stabbed every Ulsan fan in the back by abandoning them for the national team after not a meticulous screening process, but an informal chat in a bakery. Good riddance.
Any and every sign of protocol that was in place was completely disregarded to get Hong the job, which angered pretty much every football fan in Korea so much that the government actually got involved in a lengthy investigation last autumn. Sadly, the investigation did not do much, as Chung was re-elected president for a fourth consecutive time. The recent failures of the federation have led many fans to turn their backs on the national team as a whole, with some, including this writer, vowing never to go to another game until things change for the better. Some more drastic fans are even hoping for the national team to fail to qualify for the World Cup, but again, given the level of the group, that seems highly unlikely.
Hong himself claimed that the national team gig was his final way of “doing community service and giving back to Korean football.” The comment was met with universal derision, since he would be earning two to three times more money as national coach than he was making at Ulsan.
In short, Hong is just one of the many members of the Korean Football Association whose intent can be questioned, and has no business talking about any of the national team players like they are his own, let alone the clubs they play for. It is not like he has a good track record to back his words up – his only bright spots as a coach were a quarterfinal finish at the 2009 U-20 World Cup, a pretty flukey bronze medal at the 2012 Olympics, and a back-to-back K League triumph with Ulsan in 2022 and 2023. Otherwise, he finished bottom of the group at the 2014 World Cup and got Zhejiang Professional FC relegated from the Chinese Super League.
This writer sincerely hopes that not only Hong, but Chung and all of his other cronies will get their comeuppance sooner than later, but the future looks bleaker than ever.
